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Monday, 14 July 2014

Israel Does Not Want Peace

Israel Does Not Want Peace

By Gideon Levy

Rejectionism is embedded in Israel's most primal beliefs.
There, at the deepest level, lies the concept that this land is destined for
the Jews alone

Israel does not want peace. There is nothing I have ever written
that I would be happier to be proved wrong about. But the evidence is piling
up. In fact, it can be said that Israel has never wanted peace – a just peace,
that is, one based on a just compromise for both sides. It’s true that the
routine greeting in Hebrew is Shalom (peace) – shalom when one leaves and
shalom when one arrives. And, at the drop of a hat, almost every Israeli will
say he wants peace, of course he does. But he’s not referring to the kind of
peace that will bring about the justice without which there is no peace and
there will be no peace. Israelis want peace, not justice, certainly not
anything based on universal values. Thus, “Peace, peace, when there is no
peace.” Not only is there no peace: In recent years, Israel has moved away from
even the aspiration to make peace. It has despaired utterly of it. Peace has
disappeared from the Israeli agenda, its place taken by the collective
anxieties that are systematically implanted, and by personal, private matters
that now take precedence over all else.

The Israeli longing for peace seemingly died about a decade
ago, after the failure of the Camp David summit in 2000, the dissemination of
the lie that there is no Palestinian partner for peace, and, of course, the
horrific blood-soaked period of the second intifada. But the truth is that even
before that, Israel never really wanted peace. Israel has never, not for a
minute, treated the Palestinians as human beings with equal rights. It has
never viewed their distress as understandable human and national distress.

The Israeli peace camp, too – if ever there was such a thing
– also died a lingering death amid the harrowing scenes of the second intifada
and the no-partner lie. All that remained were a handful of organizations that
were as determined and devoted as they were ineffectual in the face of the
delegitimization campaigns mounted against them. Israel, therefore, was left
with its rejectionist stance.

The single most overwhelming item of evidence of Israel’s
rejection of peace is, of course, the settlements project. From the dawn of its
existence, there has never been a more reliable or more precise litmus test for
Israel’s true intentions than this particular enterprise. In plain words: The
builders of settlements want to consolidate the occupation, and those who want
to consolidate the occupation do not want peace. That’s the whole story in a
nutshell.

On the assumption that Israel’s decisions are rational, it
is impossible to accept construction in the territories and the aspiration to
peace as mutually coexisting. Every act of building in the settlements, every
mobile home and every balcony, conveys rejection. If Israel had wanted to
achieve peace through the Oslo Accords, it would at least have stopped the
construction in the settlements at its own initiative. That this did not happen
proves that Oslo was fraudulent, or at best the chronicle of a failure
foretold. If Israel had wanted to achieve peace at Taba, at Camp David, at
Sharm el-Sheikh, in Washington or in Jerusalem, its first move should have been
to end all construction in the territories. Unconditionally. Without a quid pro
quo. The fact that Israel did not is proof that it did not want a just peace.

But the settlements were only a touchstone of Israel’s
intentions. Its rejectionism is embedded far more deeply – in its DNA, its
bloodstream, its raison d’être, its most primal beliefs. There, at the deepest
level, lies the concept that this land is destined for the Jews alone. There,
at the deepest level, is entrenched the value of “am sgula” – God’s “treasured
people” – and “God chose us.” In practice, this is translated to mean that, in
this land, Jews are allowed to do what is forbidden to others. That is the
point of departure, and there is no way to get from there to a just peace.
There is no way to reach a just peace when the name of the game is the
dehumanization of the Palestinians. No way to achieve peace when the
demonization of the Palestinians is hammered into people’s heads day after day.
Those who are convinced that every Palestinian is a suspicious person and that
every Palestinian wants “to throw the Jews into the sea” will never make peace
with the Palestinians. Most Israelis are convinced of the truth of both those
statements.

In the past decade, the two peoples have been separated from
each another. The average young Israeli will never meet his Palestinian peer,
other than during his army service (and then only if he does his service in the
territories). Nor will the average young Palestinian ever meet an Israeli his own
age, other than the soldier who huffs and puffs at him at the checkpoint, or
invades his home in the middle of the night, or in the person of the settler
who usurps his land or torches his groves.

Consequently, the only encounter between the two people is
between the occupiers, who are armed and violent, and the occupied, who are
despairing and also turn to violence. Gone are the days when Palestinians
worked in Israel and Israelis shopped in Palestine. Gone is the period of the
half-normal and quarter-equal relations that existed for a few decades between
the two peoples that share the same piece of territory. It is very easy, in
this state of affairs, to incite and inflame the two peoples against one
another, to spread fears and to instill new hatreds on top of those that
already exist. This, too, is a sure recipe for non-peace.

So it was that a new Israeli yearning sprang up: the desire
for separation: “They will be there and we will be here (and also there).” At a
time when the majority of Palestinians – an assessment I allow myself to make
after decades of covering the territories – still want coexistence, even if
less and less, most Israelis want disengagement and separation, but without
paying the price. The two-state vision has gained widespread adherence, but
without any intention to implement it in practice. Most Israelis are in favor,
but not now and maybe not even here. They have been trained to believe that
there is no partner for peace – a Palestinian partner, that is – but that there
is an Israeli partner.

Unfortunately, the truth is almost the reverse. The
Palestinian non-partners no longer have any chance to prove that they are
partners; the Israeli non-partners are convinced that they are interlocutors.
So began the process in which Israeli conditions, obstacles and difficulties
were heaped up, one more milestone in Israeli rejectionism. First came the
demand for a cessation of terrorism; then the demand for a change of leadership
(Yasser Arafat as a stumbling block); and after that Hamas became the hurdle.
Now it’s the Palestinians’ refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
Israel considers every step it takes – from mass political arrests to building
in the territories – to be legitimate, whereas every Palestinian move is
“unilateral.”

The only country on the planet with no borders is so far
unwilling to delineate even the compromise borders it is ready to be satisfied
with. Israel has not internalized the fact that, for the Palestinians, the
borders of 1967 are the mother of all compromises, the red line of justice (or
relative justice). For the Israelis, they are “suicide borders.” This is why
the preservation of the status quo has become the true Israeli aim, the primary
goal of Israeli policy, almost its be-all and end-all. The problem is that the
existing situation cannot last forever. Historically, few nations have ever
agreed to live under occupation without resistance. And the international
community, too, is one day apt to utter a firm pronouncement on this state of
affairs, with accompanying punitive measures. It follows that the Israeli goal
is unrealistic.

Disconnected from reality, the majority of Israelis pursue
their regular way of life. In their mind’s eye the world is always against
them, and the areas of occupation on their doorstep are beyond their realm of
interest. Anyone who dares criticize the occupation policy is branded an
anti-Semite, every act of resistance is perceived as an existential threat. All
international opposition to the occupation is read as the “delegitimizing” of
Israel and as a provocation to the country’s very existence. The world’s seven
billion people – most of whom are against the occupation – are wrong, and six
million Israeli Jews – most of whom support the occupation – are right. That’s
the reality in the eyes of the average Israeli.

Add to this the repression, the concealment and the
obfuscation, and you have another explanation for the rejectionism: Why should
anyone strive for peace as long as life in Israel is good, calm prevails and
the reality is concealed? The only way the besieged Gaza Strip can remind
people of its existence is by firing rockets, and the West Bank only gets onto
the agenda these days when blood is shed there. Similarly, the viewpoint of the
international community is only taken into account when it tries to impose
boycotts and sanctions, which in their turn immediately generate a campaign of
self-victimization studded with blunt – and at times also impertinent –
historical accusations.

This, then, is the gloomy picture. It contains not a ray of
hope. The change will not happen on its own, from within Israeli society, as
long as that society continues to behave as it does. The Palestinians have made
more than one mistake, but their mistakes are marginal. Basic justice is on their
side, and basic rejectionism is the Israelis’ purview. The Israelis want
occupation, not peace.

about me

A new counter-culture is now spreading across the planet, a movement dedicated to protesting at the outlandish behaviour of the control freaks, with their surveillance, eavesdropping, secrecy and lies. Their greed and belligerent sabre rattling and their industries of war. The dream is to replace these sociopaths with Love!

I wish this blog to be a small part of this - We must be the change.

We will be set to task to rebuild our world and our planet from centuries of decimation and destruction brought on by the fallacy, the belief that we once tragically and collectively embraced thousands of years ago – the mistaken notion that we are separate from one another and everything else on the planet and in the universe. We will finally recognize that the truth is just the opposite – we are all one with everything on the planet and in the universe. We are spiritual beings, infinite consciousness simply having a human experience, and as soon we come to fully recognize and understand this, it will then finally be time for us to fly – to shine in all of our infinite, glorious possibility...